My parents first named me Paula. They then changed it to Flavia. It surely had an impact on my personality.

My 3 Essential Apps

Ed and his friends from the neighbourhood have roughly the same daily routine throughout the whole week. They go to school in the morning, come home for lunch and meet at Tulipo’s door for some cigarettes and petty talk. Sometimes Tulipo himself leaves his house with his guitar and plays some classics in the background, sitting on the sidewalk. Their age varies from 16 and 19 and, in theory, they should be preparing for their college exams. But very often laziness gets in the way.

Everyone in the group has cell phones (some better, some worse) and the hit amongst them has been Tinder. They show each other photos of the girls they find, arrange dates with some of them via Whatsapp and so on. That’s basically how their days go by.

In one of these afternoons, when Ed was coming home, he came across the woman who would eventually become the love of his life. A tall, alternative girl, a little older than him and with strangely coloured hair – half green, half orange. She was standing in the street, checking messages on her cell phone. She was wearing a large, colourful t-shirt with words in French that Ed could not understand. Soon he trembled, thinking she was way out of his league.

However, the girl herself made a move and asked Ed if the bus stop was anywhere around. Not long after they were laughing together at the dog that looked like its lady owner across the street, then talked about what was going on on Facebook that week and ended up exchanging phone numbers.

Truth be told, she does not even use Facebook that much. She prefers to follow art exhibitions through Artlyst and to read some of her recent downloads on iBooks. But, she said, Facebook is a necessary evil and facilitates her communication with friends and family who live far away.

From there, they arranged to meet the following Thursday at a rock concert in town. They had fun like they never did before, and, despite all the differences, could not stop seeing each other. They never went apart again.

This is a love story from 2015. But it could be from 1986. Except for all the Apps.

[THE END]

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We all have our favourite Apps. No matter what age you are, or how much internet you use in a day, it does not even matter whether you like the Apps you use.

They are part of our daily life and simplify (greatly!) tasks that we used to do in a much more spacious way. There it is, it is a matter of space. Maps, games, recipe books, postage stamps, LPs and cassette tapes, cameras, newspapers, TVs, money! All of them available in our tiny cell phones.